ROUND ONE: Could You Please Be More Specific? (Part B)

The confluence of financially-driven managerial criteria, combined with the progressive era’s lasting focus on measurable impact, has led to a growing instrumental orientation for the nonprofit sector.

I've been drawn to recent work done by Stanford PACS (Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society) focusing on language use in the nonprofit sector. Researchers there have determined, among other things, that managerial and scientific discourse has heavily influenced nonprofits and that an "interlanguage" (made up of 24 familiar words) has emerged that "spans the boundaries between the domains of civil society, scientific-research, and management." Said interlanguage is being used by all contributors and appears to be playing a role in connecting the three communities. It's also an indication, they say, that nonprofits are thinking more about managing for results.

This is part of a bigger project undertaken by Woody Powell and his team on metrics and evaluation in the nonprofit sector. (something I came across while thinking about orienting our CP orgs more in the managing-for-outcomes direction) Their goals are "to understand who is responsible for producing or creating different evaluation frameworks and metrics, who is responsible for proselytizing or carrying them to different places, and who is adopting or consuming them." I'll try to keep an eye out for and report on any potentially useful info that comes of it. 

The language an organization uses on its public web site -- subject matter of the above study -- reflects its intentional portrayal of itself. Such portrayals have been my only real windows into the thinking going on inside (what I think of as) the "CP industry." My "A Tale of Two Hope Machines" series of posts is based entirely on UCP's self-representations at www.ucp.org.* 

I haven't gone so far as to do a rigorous, PACS-style search for "evaluative" language at our other CP nonprofits' sites to get a sense of how important performance -- and measuring it -- are. I'm sure, though, I'd find some interlanguage in use. As for references more specifically to numbers, targets, performance goals, etc., here's what I see at a glance: 

• Some statistics, some facts and figures. As a result of visiting Let's Cure CP for the first time, for example, I just learned that: 1 in 3 children with CP cannot walk; 1 in 4 cannot feed themselves; 1 in 4 cannot dress themselves. And "The average medical lifetime cost for a person with CP is over one million dollars."

• Other signs of outcome-focused thinking. Reaching for the Stars lists some its specific achievements on its overview page. Example: "Through federal advocacy efforts, secured Congressional appropriations language committing to line item federal funding of Cerebral Palsy research in the 2013 budget."

We do seem to be becoming more results driven. But it's still not generally a strong point of emphasis; it's not a dominant trait. I'm of the impression that there's room for growth. Or, at least, that there may be opportunities for us to improve -- faster -- by experimenting with what in the business world are often called strategy execution or "performance management" approaches.

More "meat" with regard to using those to achieve breakthrough results in Part C.

*I've written specifically about UCP's language use on multiple occasions. In this post, for example, I zero in on its use of the word "hope": A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 3.0.